Tuesday, October 27, 2015

Tuesday Morning Links

This and that for your Tuesday reading.

- Mike Barber highlights how Canada's federal election campaign was dominated by messages pushed from the top down rather than citizens' concerns. Erna Paris recognizes that we can't afford to be complacent about the place of outright bigotry in shaping voters' decisions. And Christopher Flavelle writes that the ensuing election result represents a major test for progressives to see whether an ambivalent Liberal government can be pushed toward positive change:

If Canadians accept a few new tax breaks for the middle class, vague
pledges on climate change and some symbolic shifts — letting in more Syrian refugees, perhaps, and dropping the previous government’s efforts to ban niqabs in
citizenship ceremonies — as the fulfillment of the Liberals’ promise of
change, then the complaint that Harper was holding the country back
will look hollow.

If, however, the Liberals feel compelled by public opinion to tackle,
early on, the more controversial issues they ran on — achieving a
meaningful price on carbon, rolling back Harper’s tough-on-crime policies,
reforming drug and prostitution laws, changing the way members of
Parliament are elected — then the argument that Canada is a progressive
country at heart, long thwarted by a prime minister who wasn’t, will
acquire some meaning.

The country’s big problems haven’t been solved. We’re about to see how much Liberals, and Canadians in general, want to try.

- Open Canada offers a noteworthy list of foreign policy hopes for the new federal government. And Mike Blanchfield observes that even Stephen Harper's seeming ideological allies in Germany are joining other countries in relief that the Cons are no longer around to obstruct climate change talks and other international actions.

- Peter Henderson reports on the potentially alarming effects the TPP's copyright rules could have on Canadians.

- Melissa Dahl discusses the dangerous effects of excessive work - including its tendency to make people perform worse at the tasks they're overdoing.

- Finally, Delphine Nakache and Leanne Dixon-Perera examine the lives of Canada's temporary foreign workers, with particular emphasis on the dangers of abuse when workers know their legal stay in Canada is limited.